A Hal moment of my own

[halspacejock]

For the past decade I've been writing novels about a broke, error-prone freighter pilot called Hal Spacejock. 'Error prone' explains why he's forced to land his spaceship on the remotest landing pads in the dodgiest spaceports ... and I use 'land' in the broad, all-empassing, 'well, at least we survived' sort of way. *

Over the past twelve

Comments

WOW!

[peanut13171]

Wow!! What a fantastic story!! You must be full of yourself for just picking up the bike and biking off without a pause. I sure would be. So glad you weren't seriously hurt!! When I fall I always look around, hoping no one has seen me.

I totally admire that you bike in the rain! I'm deathly afraid to. I live in a suburb of LA and not every street has bike lanes. And I don't relish the idea of getting splashed by every car driving by. But we rarely get rain so it's not much of a problem.

I've only been biking a year and I try to do all my shopping by bike, too, but I don't have paniers so anything I buy has to fit in a backpack on my back.

Re: WOW!

[halspacejock]

Thanks for commenting. I'm still amazed I emerged unscathed.

When there aren't any bike paths or dedicated lanes I get around by using smaller back streets parallel to the main roads. Unfortunately that usually means traffic-calming roundabouts (aka bike blenders) and stop signs every hundred metres.

If you fit an el-cheapo second-hand rack to the bike you can zip tie a couple of $5-$10 schoolbags on there to make panniers. That's what I did with one of my vintage bikes.

[leecetheartist]

Thank goodness you're alright!

That was scary! I very much liked your wet spaghetti analogy..

I ride a recumbent so I don't have the same sort of spill, I'm very glad to say, but it can be awful trying to negotiate the bike paths with their twists and sharp drops in level and road works without warning.

Did you fill in the RAC survey on bike paths in W.A recently?

Please consider asking all your readers to do so too!

http://www.lympago.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b=bikes,m=1311120133,s=0

[halspacejock]

I ticked all the boxes I thought would lead to a better riding environment. I know we have to be realistic about infrastructure, but riding to Fremantle from the Roe PSP is a joke.

I think I read that it costs the same to build 1km of 6-lane freeway or 500km of bike paths. Now work out how many cars (1 person each) you can get on 1km of freeway, vs how many bikes could make use of 500km of paths.

I know a lot of motorists are anti-bikes, but 99% of riders have cars too and we choose not to clog up the roads with them. I know one bunch of riders were discussing a 'drive to work day', where everyone would leave their bikes at home and take their cars instead.

[halspacejock]

I use clipless pedals on my road bike, and I also had them on my previous hybrid. I haven't transferred the pedals to my new (which is actually much older) hybrid. Just as well, really, or I'd have been wearing the bike as a hat.

I've seen a few bents around on my travels. They seem nice and low and swift, but I think legroom would be an issue for me and storing the bike somewhere safe definitely would be.

[satimaflavell]

Congratulatios on what was a very lucky escape, Simon. I hope you never have a worse experience.

[blackberry44]

Wow! Glad you're OK.

Sadly my cycling days are over. There's little danger of falling off a disability scooter.